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Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data

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Re: Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data

#91

Post by caminante »

nostrademons wrote: post #50
fluidcruft wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did you find out about this? The timeline of this actually pushing you to do all that seems a bit unbelievable and difficult to take seriously.

Note that there was a major press cycle about this in October / November of last year - a quick Google showed stories in the Guardian, The Intercept, and the Cornell Sun, as well as commentary on Reddit. Not inconceivable that they found about it last October and had six months to leave and de-Googlify.

> Note that there was a major press cycle about this in October / November of last year

Fair point. However...the parent's comment is also fair because the article does a poor job of raising this material fact. You have to click through a sub-article.

It's almost like this article should be tagged (2025) because it's basically a replay of the author's account from 2025.[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/05/palest...

Re: Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data

#93

Post by traderj0e »

bdhe wrote: post #88
traderj0e wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What facts would you point to, to argue that the Democratic party is "owned by Israel" more than the Republican party?

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?cycle=All&ind... is one

Re: Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data

#94

Post by wasabi991011 »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #42

Honestly, I think the author is expecting too much from companies that are under jurisdiction of the US Government, especially in the situation as of 2026. It is telling that when they say "federal government" in the article, they implicitly mean the US Federal Government and not those of the UK or Trinidad and Tobago. The author (in my opinion) needs to raise this with their own governments (UK is probably the one w…

I don't see how your opinion matches the article.

Expecting a company to hold its own promise (of notifying the user before it happens) sounds like a pretty minimal expectation, hard for me to imagine it being "too much".

Furthermore, how would data sovereignty affect whether Google holds its promise on notifying users?

Re: Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data

#95

Post by keeda »

soganess wrote: post #26
avazhi wrote: post #18

[flagged]

Yeah, because the American ideal of our forefathers was FAFO? This is embarrassing to admit, but I miss the halcyon days when folks were still nominally pretending to be free speech warriors.

I think this is common sense advice rather than a philosophical stance about free speech, said advice being generalized as "When in a foreign country, avoid trouble." As an example, if you visit China and start FA about Tibet, you will FO pretty soon, no matter how right you are about free speech.

Yes, this case is a travesty, but that does not change the soundness of the advice.

Re: Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data

#96

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #55

I simply assume that everything that travels out of my home through a wire gets tracked and stored by the government. Everywhere you go, if your phone is in your pocket, you are being tracked and stored, and available to the government. Everywhere your car goes, is tracked and stored and available to the government. BTW, the J6 protesters were all tracked and identified by their cell phone data.

[deleted]

Re: Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data

#97

Post by woodydesign »

EarthAmbassador wrote: post #61
woodydesign wrote: post #53

Every time this happens the debate goes the same way — trust Google or don't, switch to Proton, self-host everything. But the real issue I believe isn't whether we trust Google. It's that the data existed somewhere it could be taken from in the first place. I've been thinking about this a lot while working on a side project. I ended up making it work entirely offline — no server, no account, no network calls. Not out…

What’s your project by the way. Would be curious to know more, if you’re up for sharing now. Later is fine too.

No monetization plan — it's all local, no server, near-zero cost to run. Free and open source. I believe good tools should be accessible to everyone. Open source first, monetization will figure itself out down the road.

It's called Hodor — prompt launcher for macOS.

Re: Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data

#98

Post by ethan_smith »

paulddraper wrote: post #92

The author not say whether the subpoena prevented advance notification. The Google policy he linked to says: > We won’t give notice when legally prohibited under the terms of the request. We’ll provide notice after a legal prohibition is lifted.

This is the key detail everyone is glossing over. NSLs and subpoenas with non-disclosure orders are extremely common in these cases - Google literally cannot notify you without being in contempt. The EFF article frames this as Google "breaking a promise" but if there was a gag order attached, they had no legal choice.

Re: Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data

#99

Post by jfoworjf »

busterarm wrote: post #24
fluidcruft wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did you find out about this? The timeline of this actually pushing you to do all that seems a bit unbelievable and difficult to take seriously.

It's this account's only comment and was only created right before posting. It has no credibility.

[flagged]

Re: Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data

#100

Post by pesus »

jfoworjf wrote: post #5

This story is the one that finally pushed me to leave google. I moved off my ~20 year old Google account and deleted everything off their services including almost a decade of Google photos. I cancelled my Google one subscription for extra space. I'm now self hosting what I can and paying proton mail for everything else. I refuse to allow a company that will hand over data at the request of an administrative warrant…

Have you run into any serious complications doing that? I'm a bit worried that I've used my google account for so long and for many things that I might accidentally lock myself out of something important without it.
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